


Monkeys in Space

by nanasekei



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Character Study, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 19:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12139956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanasekei/pseuds/nanasekei
Summary: A study on how various species adapt to shipboard life.





	Monkeys in Space

Lexi noticed the smell first.

It was only natural for her – she had a very sensitive nose. It wasn’t exactly something to brag about, and not as helpful in medicine as it would be in other areas, but sometimes it could be fun. As a maiden, she had dated a turian who would often play smell guessing games with her, and it was an inside joke between them that Lexi would beat her at it every single time. Perfumes, essences, even disgusting odors, it didn’t matter. There was just no fooling her nose.

So when Ryder rushed inside the Tempest with a large cage on her hand, grinning from ear to ear, Lexi already knew she’d gotten the crew a new pet – and (because she knew Ryder) that she wasn’t going to change her mind about it, no matter what anyone said.

Therefore, Lexi didn’t even bother trying to explain all the reasons why a Pathfinder vessel didn’t need a pet. She just stared at the little creature for a moment, shrugged, and went on with her day. She had learned that it was smarter to pick your battles with Ryder – actually, it was better to _avoid_ as many battles as possible, and she already had to deal with way too many just trying to take care of the woman in the first place.

Keeping Ryder alive and healthy was by far one of the hardest things she ever had to do, and, considering her track record of unwise decisions, a pet wasn’t so bad, after all. At least it was not going to get anyone killed. 

Still, it smelled terribly. And Ryder had the brilliant idea of putting the cage right outside of the med bay, so for the first few days, Lexi’s productivity was severely affected by that damn smell flooding the place every time someone made the mistake of opening the door. She forgot twice to remember Drack a third time in the day to take his vitamins, miscalculated the calories in Cora’s daily ration intakes by four and a half, and made a ton of other rookie mistakes she hadn’t made since her first years as a doctor. It was when she realized that she had only been able to get through the first two chapters of Jilot Droya’s thesis on the genophage (barely four hundred pages!) that she knew _something_ had to be done.

She could just ask Ryder to put the cage somewhere else. It wouldn’t require much effort. Although, to be honest, she thought, her annoyance growing as she put down doctor Droya’s work in the table behind her to stare at the door separating her and the source of that putrid odor, Ryder should just be an adult for once and realize that the last thing a team of people risking their lives to find new worlds in a new galaxy needed was another living being to take care of. She knew Liam and Jaal were taking turns feeding it, and she had seen Suvi and Kallo playing around with it, but honestly, did they really need that extra work? It was such a waste of time and resources, and, even if it wasn’t making a difference at the moment, it certainly had to be considered as a future issue. Lexi stood up, already formulating a list of arguments in her head. Even Ryder wasn’t going to be able to deny the obvious if she sat her down and forced her to hear it.

However, when she opened the door to get out of the lab, something unexpected happened: The little thing jumped in the cage, scared, and made a squeaky noise.

Lexi stared at it. It stared right back at her, with big, curious dark eyes, and the obvious truth dawned on her: The pyjak was small, and cute, and everyone in the crew was getting used to it already, and she would just be annoying, uptight Lexi ruining everyone’s fun if she forced Ryder to get rid of it. She could already see Peebe’s eye roll if she tried to argue mentioning that she wasn’t able to study as much as she wanted to. “You should probably take it away, Ryder, before Lexi decides to take it apart to see if it’s been eating enough protein”, she could imagine her saying.

(Peebee was an individual with very deep commitment issues and a subtle aversion to anything she perceives as stereotypical asari behavior, Lexi reminded herself. It wasn’t  _personal_ , the stuff she sometimes said to her. It wasn’t meant to hurt.)

She sighed, resting her arm against the cage’s bars. She didn’t want to be unreasonable. She knew Vetra and Drack would respectfully listen to her concerns. And Ryder would dismiss her, either – she could be childish and thoughtless sometimes, but if Lexi made it clear it was bothering her that much, she would listen. Ryder’s main quality as a pathfinder and leader was also one of her many qualities as a person: She cared. She cared for Andromeda and the Milky Way, for the angara and the Initiative, for the Tempest crew and for a tiny, silly pyjak nobody else had wanted to take on their ships.

She cared so openly and deeply that it was scary to watch, sometimes. If some people carried their hearts on their sleeves, Ryder had hers on the palm of her hands, showing off to anyone who came across her, holding onto it as steady as she held her gun.

(Keeping Ryder alive and healthy was by far one of the hardest things she ever had to do. It was also, in her opinion, the most important.)

The pykak gawked again, carefully approaching her, and Lexi observed it. Back home, she had studied pyjaks a little, when she was researching Tuchanka’s environment for her thesis. The krogan didn’t like them very much, and from what she could tell, they had a point. Pyjaks weren’t particularly useful for anything other than a quick snack. Much like other animals such as dogs, from Earth, they were used mainly as companions. Apparently, that was enough to carry them across galaxies.

She put her hand in between the bars of the cage, and the pyjak leaned forward, sniffing it. After a few seconds, it stuck it’s tongue out and licked her. As she didn’t retreat, it kept licking, waving it’s tail around in an unmistakable sign of happiness.

Lexi felt herself smiling. It _was_ cute.

The odor was still there, of course. Maybe if her nose wasn’t so sensitive, it wouldn’t bother her at all, she thought. Most of the crew didn’t seem to mind it. She remembered her ex staring at her with her mouth opened after she had flawlessly guessed five different smells in a row. Silonia was a blunt turian with somewhat brute manners, and she didn’t have any qualms about looking at her in shock and going “Wow, Lex, you’re like a robot”.

(She said the exact same words on the day they broke up. Lexi remembered the hurt, the nervousness, the anger – at Silonia, at the situation, at herself for not being able to cry about it and prove her wrong.

She cried later that night, in the privacy of her apartment, and Silonia never knew, because Lexi never managed to tell her.)

She shaked her head. It was pointless to dwell in such memories. She knew how people saw her – she didn’t really need to ponder on Sidonia or Peebee or anyone else’s words to be aware of that.

The pyjak licked her hand again. It was clearly healthy and receptive to contact. There was not a clear agreement on who was responsible for the animal on a daily basis, but, judging by how well fed and happy the little thing looked, it wasn’t needed.

As she looked at the little creature, Lexi found herself changing her mind about it. It was scientifically proven that pets could do wonders to improve morale and help with mental health issues such as depression or anxiety. Perhaps she could do some observation tests – see if everyone was truly enjoying having it around. Someone as caring as Vetra could definitely benefit from having a living thing to watch out for, and pets were great for commitment issues like Peebee’s or Gil’s. Drack would have something to remind him of home. And even Ryder herself, she could use some distraction, something small and cute to call her family when she had pretty much lost her own.

(As a doctor, it was always her first instinct to help. Sometimes it was as simple as prescribing a medicine or performing a surgery, but most of the times it involved a lot of trial and error, a lot of guessing. She had to consider every possibility, every angle; to ask uncomfortable, personal questions no one really wanted to respond. When it came to those questions, she didn’t really have an easy time asking them, either. She didn’t always knew how. Still, she wanted everyone in the Tempest in their best form - alive, healthy and happy.

The last part wasn’t really something she could accomplish by herself, but that would never stop her from trying.)

She smiled at the pyjak one final time, then slid her hand to open it’s cage. Maybe Ryder had a point, after all. Maybe a pet wasn’t such a bad idea.

(She’d get over the smell eventually.)

 

* * *

 

Back home, Drack would have shot it. Pyjaks were an annoying plague, always around the food reserves, taking advantage of their size to avoid the defense lines. Sure, sometimes they made for a nice snack, but he was way past the time of just grabbing anything edible and throwing it in his mouth without a second thought.

He’d still eat it, though. He was never one to refuse food. However, with age he had learned sometimes it was better to wait to eat stuff cooked – and maybe with a nice sauce.

But he knew Ryder would never agree to his menu suggestions. So when he saw the cage, he just approached it, shrugged, and let Ryder try to convince the others it was a good idea.

Afterwards, he just forgot the little piece of meat even existed, to be honest. He had better things to worry about than humans’ weird habit of calling any animal that didn’t try to eat them a pet. Hell, Ryder could bring a fiend to the Tempest for all he cared.

(Actually, that’d be fun.) 

One day, though, he ended up coming across the pyjak in the hall outside his kitchen, sniffing everything around it.

So it had managed to get loose. Drack sighed. He didn’t actually know how to deal with live pyjaks – back home, you were either eating them or trying to shoot them to eat them later.

(Shooting at pyjaks was actually one of the few non-deadly ways of having fun in Tuchanka. His old mother used to take him to shoot at them whenever she wanted to just stay still for a while and talk.

It was not any kind of motherly talk. She’d just stand there, kill pyjaks, and tell him some of her war stories. Sometimes she talked about her past, the beginning of the rebellions, the contact with the salarians before that. Other times, she didn’t say anything at all.

As a kid, he always got excited when news of a pyjak infestation came).

He stopped a few steps away from it, not sure of what to do. The pyjak looked at him curiously, sniffed the air and made a barking noise. Drack rolled his eyes.

(After his mother died, he couldn’t remember what made shooting pyjaks fun in the first place. The other males acted as if it was a game or something. Drack didn’t see it. For him it was just a boring, pointless and endless fight they couldn’t win – much like all the other fights they’d have for the next hundreds of years.)

He decided to just pretend it wasn’t there. It was probably the best solution, because he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t lose his temper on that vermin, and he didn’t want to end up being the grumpy old man who ate the crew’s pet. He had seen Ryder get all excited playing with it, and even if he didn’t really understand why, the kid seemed happy.

The pyjak barked again, and Drack stared at it, annoyed. It was tiny and fragile, and he wasn’t good at dealing with anything with those traits. The last small and helpless thing he’d taken care of was baby Kesh, and his granddaughter stopped being helpless the moment she grew teeth.

(Still, even with nothing but gums, she’d crawl all over anything she found interesting, fearless. He could still see her expression glacing towards a thresher maw he and his men had just killed – no crying or trembling, just a curiosity and desire to get closer, to pick it apart, to make it explode. Even now, it gave him a shiver of pride.)

He started walking away, and the vermin barked one more time. Drack turned around to it, got closer, and stared firmly. He really didn’t get why Ryder would care for that thing, but he didn’t always understand how the kid worked anyway - her passionate speeches and silly jokes weren’t what made him follow her, but the way she put herself in battle, with a strength he hadn’t seen in many humans before. It had awed him in Eos and in every mission since then, and it seemed to grow more and more as their work got harder. He didn’t need to understand to respect it.

The pyjak stared right back at him.

Drack stood there for a moment, surprised. Then he took one step forward, growled, and watched as the pyjak gawked and ran away, terrified.

He laughed. The little vermin knew it’s place, after all. Still, it had a bit of a backbone, not running away just with his stare – not a lot of people managed that. Turning around to go back to his kitchen, Drack thought maybe that’s what Ryder had seen in it, but he was pretty sure she would take with her anything or anyone she thought might need help – vermin, angara or an old, grizzly krogan who had thought he’d never belong anywhere else again.

(Ryder _could_ bring a fiend to the Tempest, for all he cared –he’d help her fight it.)

 

* * *

 

Cora was a dog person. So when Ryder first told her about it, she was actually kind of excited. She kept it cool in front of the Pathfinder, but she had been an animal lover since she was a child. The asari weren’t pet enthusiasts, so in her commando days, she didn’t get the chance to interact with many, and it was one of the few parts of human culture she actually missed. At the freighter, her mother had an old dog Cora always played with, Toby. He was big, goofy and sweet, and they got along well. Growing up, he was one of her closest friends.

(It helped that the dog was pretty much the only person who did not stop talking to her when she’d accidentally levitate him during playtime. He barked like crazy at first, but when he realized she wasn’t going to hurt him, he got used to it. He liked Cora and trusted her, and he knew that if he didn’t bark too loudly when he got levitated he would get a treat afterwards, so he was fine with it. She wished it could be that easy with humans.)

Of course, Toby was now long dead. He had passed away a year before she joined the Initiative, which meant that in the Milky Way, his body had already been decomposed and turned into part of Earth’s soil hundreds of years before they even got to half of the way. She had no idea if human beings still owned dogs on Earth right now, if dogs hadn’t gotten extinct, if _human beings_ hadn’t gotten extinct, or if Earth still existed.

She still couldn’t get used to those thoughts. It made her head spin, and part of her was almost relieved they couldn’t get any communication through to their descendants – she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know anything about them, if there were any. In her mind, it was easier to think of the Milky Way as if it had frozen in time the moment she stepped into cryo. Lexi had told her that wasn’t the healthiest coping method, but she didn’t care. They were in Heleus now, for better or worse. Cora’s only worry had to be how to make it better.

And sure, it was far from a necessity, and she’d never admit it, but honestly, in her opinion, a dog would make it easier. Dogs made everything easier.

And yeah, fine, a pyjak wasn’t a dog. But it was close enough – at least, that was what she first thought.

“Hey, you” she said, when she saw it at the bio lab, for the first time after Ryder told her it had escaped the cage. The pyjak stared at her curiously. Cora wished she had some treat to offer him (her? There was no clear way to tell it), but she didn’t know what pyjaks ate. She had a guess it could be pretty much anything, but she didn’t want to risk poisoning Ryder’s pet by accident.

She tried offering her hand for it to lick it instead, but the pyjak turned it’s back and ran away the second she raised her arm.

The same thing happened on the second time she ran across it, and the third, and every other time since. For some reason, the newest member of the crew didn’t want anything to do with her, and she couldn’t understand why. It would play around with Liam and Jaal, eat from Suvi’s or Ryder’s hand and even hang around Drack without any problems, but it wouldn’t approach Cora, and it ran away quickly every time she tried to get close.

It was very clearly not a dog, then, that was obvious– it was way more elusive and subtle than any dog could ever be; almost like a cat, but not as graceful. Ryder compared it to a monkey, and she could see it, because of how it would hang upside down on it’s tail sometimes, but Cora thought monkeys were friendlier. The pyjak was almost capricious with it’s affection, moving around the ship aimlessly, playing with whoever it was willing to do so. It seemed able to get along considerably well with anyone for a short period of time, except her, of course.

Peebee was the one who solved the mystery. She saw one of her attempts to pet it, watched as it ran away and casually commented: “It’s the eezo, you know. It can feel the energy and it gets freaked out. A little bit won’t bother it, but in a biotic, it’s like a cloud of bad smell right above your head”. Cora stared at her, confused, and she shrugged. “It happens with me too, but I don’t mind watching it from afar. I like the tail”. She said, as if that explained everything.

So the pyjak didn’t hate her. That was something.

It was just another addition to the long list of living beings who were too scared by her powers to approach her. That was… Something else.

(“Eezo” was an incredibly innocent name for something that seemed to shape everything about her existence.)

She felt hurt, then stupid for caring about something like that. She was just way too damn sensible lately, and honestly, it was exhausting. Lexi had tried to get her into one or two therapy-like conversations, and she immediately dodged it. She didn’t need a moment to dwell on things she didn’t want to think about – they kept coming at the most random and inconvenient times already, and if a pyjak’s behavior was all it took to make her feel rejected, that was enough “getting in touch with her feelings” for the day.

(Alec hated those things too. It was something they had in common. Psychological evaluations were the worst type of health exams, and he always had a snide comment ready for Carlyle’s questions. She held back her laughter as he rolled his eyes at the doctor’s words. They talked a lot, but never about those things – they were soldiers, there wasn’t time or reason to discuss personal lives.

She used to think Alec – and, by extension, herself – was just above all of that. He was a soldier, a leader. He was not a friend. He was not the parent of two children who wouldn’t know how much his father loved them until he died to prove it. He was the _Pathfinder_. He was going to guide them across galaxies. He was going to lead them into a new world, a new home. He was not going to let them get lost.

He was the Pathfinder because he knew the path they had to take, and in time, he was going to show it to her too.

He was not supposed to leave her stranded in the middle of the way.)

Cora decided to just ignore the animal, then. She didn’t want to insist on something pointless, and she didn’t want to stress Ryder’s pet by chasing it around the ship.

To the pyjak’s credit, it seemed happy to stay out of her way. She didn’t see it much, so it was easy to not think about it. She had other things to worry about, obviously – the asari ark was the main priority, but there were way too many outposts to stablish, angara to negotiate with and kett to kill for her to focus solely on the Periphona’s whereabouts, even if she wanted to. She knew she was being biased, and she knew the salarian and turian arks were just as important as the asari’s, but honestly, if she had the option of picking someone to go with her to a galaxy full of possible dangers, a huntress would be her first choice.

(At night, before going to sleep, she’d often reread her favorite parts of Sarissa’s manuals, mouthing the instructions to herself quietly. Breathe, purpose, action. She imagined her at the Battle of Kerkis, holding up that shield, the only thing between life and death for that entire city. She wondered if her hands shivered at all, if her heart was beating too fast on her chest, if there had been a moment she thought she wouldn’t make it. She remembered Habitat 7 and that energy blast, Alec disappearing from her sight, her chest tightening, that feeling of dread as she waited to listen to Sam’s voice on her head. And waited. And waited.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and mouthed Sarissa’s instructions. Breathe, purpose, action. Breathe, purpose, action. Breath, purpose, action. Loss serves a huntress like fuel serves fire.)

So most of the time, she looked for any sign, any clue of where the Periphona might have ended up. It had to be somewhere, and there had to be some of the crew left, too. She wasn’t certain of many things in Andromeda, but one thing she knew for sure was that they couldn’t expect to get anywhere without asari.

_Cora_ couldn’t, at least. She needed her people.

Therefore, when they managed to find the signal and Ryder told her to get ready, a pyjak’s antics were the furthest thing from her mind.

(When she was younger, the idea of fighting alongside Sarissa would have gotten her ecstatic. That day, however, staring at the huntress’s ashamed face, hearing Matriarch Ishara’s last breath, that familiar feeling of betrayal washing over her, she almost wished someone else had found the ark instead.)

When she got to her loading station, she couldn’t find her helmet. She never misplaced equipment, so that was odd. She search around the room for it, only to find it behind a couple of boxes, with the pyjak curled up inside of it, in the middle of a heavy sleep.

Her first reflex was to shoo it away, worried about any damage the helmet might have taken. Afterwards, though, even with the nervousness of the mission, she couldn’t help but smile a little. Apparently, eezo didn’t affect her smell at all.

 

* * *

 

Vetra thought it was too small. A lot of things could seem small to her, sure, but the pyjak just seemed so tiny in front of her statuesque figure. It made her a bit nervous. She also didn’t really get the point of a pet in a Pathfinder vessel – it was just one more mouth to feed, after all, and it didn’t really have any practical function she was aware of. They weren’t meant to eat it (even though Drack could think otherwise) and pyjaks were useless in battle.

Of course, Ryder already knew all of that when she decided to bring it to the ship anyway, so Vetra wouldn’t bother explaining it to her again. It wasn’t her place to question Ryder’s decisions, as much as she didn’t always understand them. Her job was to make sure they happened smoothly.

So the first thing she wanted to know was where it would stay. Ryder showed her the cage, and it seemed fine, but the pyjak didn’t stay there for long. Once it got out, it never came back, seeming to prefer hanging out in the most random corners of the ship instead. Pyjaks could adapt to pretty much any environment, as her research told her, so it didn’t really matter as long as Gil managed to keep it out of the capacitators. It was probably better for the animal to get some exercise as well, she thought. She didn’t know how it managed to got out (maybe Jaal had a point and it was smarter than it seemed), but after a while she threw away the cage, since it obviously had no intention of coming back.

Then, she needed to know how to feed it. According to what Drack told her, pyjaks didn’t need to eat much, and they ate pretty much anything most levo amino acid based species ate. That meant Vetra didn’t need to worry about it stealing her rations, which was nice, but it didn’t help her to pick which food to give it. She had no idea what levo-foods tasted like, but it was clear, based on the crew’s reactions whenever she’d stock up on something new, that there were vastly different opinions about it – Cora personally thanked her when she saw olive cans in the stock, while Liam made a disgusted noise and Drack just shrugged. When it came to dextro-based foods, she only had to get stuff for herself. It was harder to have to take in account so many different pallets.

And now, a pet. Thankfully it didn’t need to be fed that often – one or twice times a day was more than good enough. Plus, Liam and Jaal were always giving it treats, so at least she knew the pyjak wouldn’t starve if she by any reason forgot to give it’s ration. It peed everywhere, though, and that was an annoyance; Ryder promised she would clean it, but honestly, sometimes Vetra didn’t want to bother her with that. Ryder had so much on her plate already just by being Ryder, so in Vetra’s opinion, she didn’t need to deal with daily chores on top of that.

Vetra didn’t mind helping – it was her job, after all.

(It was her whole thing.)

As a kid, she had seen pyjaks in Tuchanka, in between a job or another. Tuchanka was far from a hot commercial spot, but there were always clans needing to trade, so it was a safe credits source for her. In addition, she quickly learned that, for better or worse, nobody was more upfront during a negotiation than a krogan. She always knew what she was going to get.

(Still, the first few times she stood in front of a warlord and his krantt, a lanky teenager with one gun she barely knew how to fire, she to take a deep breath to stop shaking. Then she looked at the pyjaks walking around, trying to calm herself down, thinking about how cute Sid would think they were.

Sid. Sid. Sid. She clenched her fists and stared at the warlord’s eyes. She needed to come home with food that night.)

Besides Tuchanka, though, she didn’t see many pyjaks during her travels. She definitely hadn’t seen any in Andromeda until Ryder decided to get one – she had no idea who in their right mind thought to bring the genome for pyjaks of all creatures, let alone approve it, but it didn’t matter now that it was alive and breathing.

It didn’t bother her on the ship, though. In fact, it seemed happy to leave her alone, and Vetra was grateful for it. She was just glad it was adapting to the crew’s routine, apparently just like Ryder wanted. That was good enough for her.

(She mentioned it to Sid in one of their calls, and she thought it was the best thing ever. She wanted to know if it had a name, if it was cute, what it ate, how it behaved, anything. She begged her for a picture. She sounded just so childish and excited Vetra had to smile.

She liked when Sid sounded her age. Between all the fights they had been having, Vetra wasn’t always sure of which tone to take, how to make her listen, to not get her so annoyed that she’d hang up on her. When she was just a kid, it was so much easier. Everything was so simple to explain, so easy to make her buy it: Abandoning Palaven, stealing crap to sell, watching pyjaks while standing in front of a krogan warlord, leaving the galaxy. All Vetra had to do was hold her hand and promise it would be okay. Part of her wished it could have been like this forever.)

And then there was the chocolate.

To say it caught her off guard would be an understatement.

It was supposed to be just an average checkup of the supplies. It was important to keep track of everything they had, because they never knew when they would need something new: An ingredient for a new antidote for a new poisonous plant, a material to trade with a new species, medicine to survive through an unexpected wrong turn and subsequent accident in the Scourge – the list went on and on and on. There was so much to keep track of, so much that could go wrong, and absolutely zero room for her to let that happen.

Besides, she wanted to have all their numbers ready for their next trip to Aya – the merchant was quickly warming up to the idea of trading with them, she knew, and there was a good chance her next offer would be accepted. She could tell when someone was ready to cave, and she was rarely wrong.

(She was rarely wrong about negotiations, deals, bluffs.

She was, apparently, very much wrong about galaxies and places to take her younger sister to spend the rest of her life. And she couldn’t be.)

However, when she stepped into the storage room, there was a huge mess waiting for her on the floor: Boxes opened and scattered all around, scratches at the walls, fucking _pee_ right next to her vitamins container.

And the chocolate. It had been so hard to find, and even harder to keep it hidden away from the curious eyes of Tann’s management at the Nexus. Whatever it tasted like, it sure must be incredible, because not only humans were dying to get their hands on it – rumor had it that Morda had been looking for it in the black market, and that she would give a generous offer to anyone willing to supply her with constant chocolate shipments. For Vetra, it was a gold mine. She was planning to stall Morda for a little while, pretend she hadn’t already gotten it to see if she could get her to pay even more.

(She was also planning to save some part of those credits, just a small amount, to get something for Sid, the next time they were on the Nexus. She was still trying to figure out how to act after her irresponsibility at Merriweather’s ship – the sight of the weapon pointing at Sid’s head, the longest minute of her entire life, haunted her. They had talked, and Ryder tried to calm her down, but she still wasn’t sure of how to proceed. She thought a gift could make her happier and less willing to pick a fight for anything – it always worked when she was a child. She wasn’t sure how it would go now, though.

“She just wants to be more like you”, Ryder had said. It was true. That, in Vetra’s opinion, was the worst part.)

And now it was gone. Her gold mine was all over the pyjak’s satisfied face while he licked an empty package, waving its tail around like the happiest creature in the universe.

Vetra wanted to kick it.

She couldn’t, obviously. She sighed heavily and moved forward to check the other boxes. The pyjak didn’t acknowledge her.

She checked the chocolate box – thankfully, it wasn’t all gone. She could still try to strike up a deal with Morda with that quantity, but it would have to be a one-time thing. There was no chance that would last through constant shipments for enough time until her next re-stock.  

She felt so tired. Yet another thing not going as planned was far from what she needed. Vetra knew she had to clean up that mess and throw the pyjak out of the room, but she just stood there, staring at the half-empty chocolate box.

The pyjak gawked, apparently wanting her attention. When she looked, it jumped excitedly, then it started to chase it’s own tail.

It was strangely endearing, and Vetra smiled despise herself. She couldn’t help but think of how ridiculous the entire situation was. She imagined explaining to Morda that Ryder’s pet had eaten half of the product she wanted. Then she imagined explaining to Morda Ryder kept a pyjak as a pet. To her own surprise, she felt herself holding back a laugh.

Sid would love that, she realized.

Vetra walked out of the storage room. She’d ask Gil or Drack to clean it up for her as a favor. They always offered help.

As for the pyjak, she decided to leave it alone. And to take it with her on her next time on the Nexus.

(Maybe Vetra could be a little more like her.

Maybe they’d laugh together.)

 

* * *

 

The angara were not strangers to the notion of keeping animals as companions. There weren’t many in Havarl, but some kept domesticated adhi as pets in Aya. Jaal found it interesting, but never enough to keep one of his own – besides, the Resistance would never allow it. He knew how it worked, though, so Ryder didn’t have to explain why the small animal with the long tail would be living with them when she brought the cage to the ship.

What seemed strange was that, to him, it did not look like a domestic animal. He had seen domesticated adhi, how primal they looked, either eating like beasts or playing around like children – staring right into their eyes, he could tell someone was definitely there, but that was it. There was no trace of any rational thought.

Staring into the pyjak’s eyes made him think someone was staring right back.

That didn’t mean he opposed Ryder’s decision. In Jaal’s opinion, it didn’t look like a pet, but a lot of things in those aliens’s lives and cultures weren’t what they seemed. It was a bit like dismantling kett weapons – something could look completely different on the outside than on the inside. Taken apart, each piece did not resemble the whole they were previously part of, and sometimes, when he was younger, he was not even able to put things back together after he dismounted them.

(Not that he would ever dismount Ryder’s pet, of course. Even if part of him was a bit curious about how such big eyes could fit in such a tiny skull.)

But that was what made it incredible. There was just so much to see at the ship, so many details to observe. There was an endless amount of stuff to learn and understand. Even the most plain conversations with the crew could reveal him something new, a new aspect of one of the many different cultures he was around now, or even about the other species he had not gotten the chance to meet yet. There was so much he didn’t know, so much to discover.

(They traveled for six hundred years searching for a new home. He thought about that, sometimes. Liam told him people left families, friends, loved ones. They weren’t running from anything. All of those aliens, of different species, different planets and different cultures decided to embark in a one-way trip together; all of them with their own reasons, all looking up at the stars and wondering what was on the other side.

He imagined doing it – going into a frozen, tiny space to fall asleep and wake up in a world unlike anything he had ever known. He wondered what it was like to leave everything behind.  Never seeing his mother again, or his siblings, or the Moshae. Never setting foot in Aya or Havarl again for the rest of his life. Never finding out if his people managed to free themselves from the kett – maybe never finding out anything about what happened to the galaxy he left behind at all.

He thought about all of that many times. The first time was in Aya, at the Resistance’s quarters, listening to Efvra and the Governor arguing about Ryder’s visit. He wondered what the Milky Way was like. How bad could it be, for them to leave it like that? Six hundred years – he couldn’t even imagine staying alive for that long, let along spend all that time waiting. He imagined starting over in a new place, in a completely different world. He imagined never having to fight a kett again.

He wondered how far he would go to find a home.

When Efvra and the Governor finished their talk, Jaal came up to them to tell them he would be leaving when the aliens did.

He did not know the answer to that question, but he wanted to find out.)

Jaal knew that, if he wanted to learn, there was nothing like watching what was around him. The Moshae once said experience was the most complete form of science, and that was one of the very few of her teachings he was able to immediately comprehend.

So in the Tempest, he did his best to try to pay attention to even the most mundane details. He knew everyone was glad to answer any questions he could have, but he didn’t want to interrogate the others randomly – he didn’t have to know a culture to be aware that some topics were more sensitive than others, and he didn’t want to accidentally offend anyone.

That was where Liam came in handy. They had random ask-answer sessions where nothing was off-limits, and they could both let it all out, and let each other know whether that was a normal question or something that would get your face punched in the Nexus or in Aya. It wasn’t easy, but it was always extremely educational, and Jaal was so grateful for him for it.

(He was grateful for Liam in general, actually - his talks, his jokes, their time together in the ship. He didn’t get to build many friendships inside the Resistance, where Efvra’s strong command didn’t give a lot of room for personal connections, so it was such an amazing new bond to have with someone. He felt blessed.

He told Liam this once, and he got somewhat flushed, which to Jaal was hilarious.

“Humans don’t usually get so blunt about their feelings” He tried to explain.

“Not all angaran do, either. We always try, but it’s easier for some than others” Jaal shrugged. “Personally, I always found it pretty easy.”

“Well, you’re a special guy. For your people and anybody else’s.” Liam said, and Jaal just stared at him. “And that’s all the personal talk you’ll be getting from me today” He completed, laughing and exiting the room. Jaal felt his cheeks hurt from smiling.)

When it came to the others, though, he wasn’t so sure. They were all willing to explain basic things, but the most intricate, complex thoughts and interactions were impossible to sum up into words. It took him a while to understand why Kallo seemed uncomfortable around Drack, for example – and when he got it, he couldn’t understand how Vetra and him got along so well. He didn’t get why Lexi would always call for a “goddess” when she was shocked by something, since she told him she wasn’t religious. He was also confused on the first time Suvi mentioned her faith and said others often found weird that a scientist was so devoted –to him, there was nothing unusual about it.

And now, the pyjak. Drack called it a vermin with such obvious disdain, and yet, from Jaal’s point of view, it seemed like a majestic creature. From what Liam told him, it could not be trained to help in battle, and although it was supposed to be a companion, it didn’t hang onto anyone in particular, not even Ryder. It seemed so quiet and solemn, only making noises when it was scared. Liam talked to it like you would speak to a very dumb child, but, to him, it seemed wise.

He considered trying to communicate with it. He even asked Ryder about it, but she laughed. “It’d be like having a conversation with a monkey, Jaal” she said, and when he told her he didn’t have the faintest idea of what a monkey was, she promised she’d message him some pictures.

(They were new habitants in a new galaxy, and yet, in the Tempest, sometimes it felt like he was.)

He gave up the idea of learning it’s language, even though he still thought it probably had one. He did tell his mom about it, though, in one of their conversations. She advised him to respect the way the others in the ship treated it.

So he started paying attention to how it interacted with everyone else. He could see Cora didn’t spend much time around it, while Liam took it upon himself to train it to stop peeing around the ship (in Jaal’s opinion, it knew what it was doing and there was no way to convince it otherwise, but Liam disagreed). Drack was clearly not fond of it, while Kallo and Suvi seemed to enjoy it’s company.

He wondered how the pyjak felt. Liam had told him it had not been brought into cryo like the others. Instead, it had been recreated from an original genome, in a Nexus lab, along with a ton of other animals.

It had never known the Milky Way. That was something they had in common.

But it didn’t know Heleus, either. It was the definition of an outsider, thrown into a galaxy it had never seen, coming from a place it had never known. Jaal felt sorry for it. It had never even seen any other of it’s species. He could only imagine how lonely that felt.

He wanted to help it somehow. So, even though Liam rolled his eyes at the idea, Jaal started to bring small pieces of local flora to the pyjak – flowers, plants, rocks – just for it get used to new environments. It seemed to enjoy them, which encouraged him.

After a while, it seemed to prefer items from specific places. It loved Elaaden’s rocks, for some reason. It didn’t seem especially interested in anything from Voeld. And it loved anything from Aya – any plant or flower he bought from there seemed to fascinate the animal immensely.

Jaal decided to bring it fruit, then. He bought a big Paripo in the market, to keep it in his room at the Tempest, and give small pieces to the pyjak from time to time. It felt weird, to have a fruit around without any plans of a family reunion. In normal circumstances, he would never have kept an entire fruit for himself – but, of course, those circumstances were far from normal. He could save it to share with his family, but he didn’t know when their next stop at Havarl would be, or how long they would stay there. The Tempest only went to a planet when there was an important mission to take care of. There were times when they needed to restock supplies, but there was no reason to do that on his home planet when there were places like Kadara or the Nexus.

It was just one of the many new things he had to adapt to. He was starting to get good at that.

He could tell the pyjak was growing to enjoy his company, too. He was one of his favorites, it seemed, along with Suvi, Gil, and, for reasons no one understood, Lexi. It was nice. The pyjak didn’t look like a pet to him, sure, but there was no reason it couldn’t be a friend. Besides, it felt good to be around someone in the ship with whom he didn’t have to worry about any social norms he wasn’t aware of. His new crew was more welcoming than he would have anticipated, but none of them could deny that he was an alien in their eyes. Sometimes, it could get uncomfortable.

It didn’t help to feel the eyes on him outside the Tempest, too. Everyone in Aya always had so many questions, wanting to know every detail about the new aliens. He’d get emails from the most random acquaintances, wanting to hear stories about whatever they were doing and even trying to get in contact with Ryder through him.

Still, even though it wasn’t always easy to handle, he enjoyed it. Maybe it was a childish thought, but it made him happy to think he’d finally have something to brag about on the next family reunion. The Resistance was nothing like he imagined it would be. The best he had to share was the story of another failed mission, or another successful mission where the only main successs involved was “we lived”. He knew they were fighting a war, and there was no time to dream of epic victories and glories. Still, at times, the experience of actually fighting kett on the flesh was more frustrating than empowering. In the Resistance, he often felt like a small, insignificant part of something way bigger than he could fight or understand. In the Tempest, he felt at the center of something huge and important. He was a pioneer, an angara in an alien crew, making contact with other species, paving the way for future alliances. Even something as small as giving the pyjak a piece of fruit was enough to make him happy.

And the kett. It was one thing fighting them in the Resistance, where everyone could name at least five members of their family they had lost to their armies. In the Tempest, he was fighting with a bunch of people who had just found out about them. Their anger was fresh, justified. It hadn’t been swallowed by the bitterness and sadness he sometimes saw in Efvra’s eyes. That look of raw defeat his old commander tried so hard to hide, he did not see it in those aliens. Not on Drack, who was over a thousand of years old. Not on Ryder, who pretty much lost her entire family the moment they arrived in Heleus. And certainly not on that small, graceful creature who had been created to live on a ship floating in a galaxy it didn’t know.

In fact, there was only one time he saw someone else in the Tempest with that look: On himself, right after they came back from rescuing the Moshae.

(He couldn’t talk to anybody when he first got back from that mission – not even the Moshae, not even Liam. The images of all the enemies he ever killed kept coming back to him, like ghosts, which was even more hurtful because of it’s impossibility. He wasn’t a huge believer in reincarnation, but even the most devoted ones couldn’t deny the souls of the exalted were forever lost. He had never thought of how kett viewed death before – if they had beliefs, religion or anything similar– but now that he did, it hit him like a bullet: That was what they believed in. He remembered the terrified look on that soldier’s face, how it screamed when the Cardinal’s hand touched it. That was what they prayed for.

He didn’t tell his mother about it. But she called him, later, and in the moment he heard her voice, he couldn’t hold back the tears. They prayed for the end of his people’s existence. They prayed for their souls to fade in the void. They prayed so that those they captured could never find their way home.

He remembered the fear he felt when he first looked at a Chosen’s face. It never crossed his mind it could have been scared too.)

His time in the Tempest changed after that. Even after the initial shock had worn off, it didn’t feel that exciting anymore. He felt silly for the pride he had before. Part of him wanted to scream at everyone in the crew, to shake Ryder by the shoulders, to tell Kallo to go straight up to the Archon’s ship and find a way to kill him, somehow. He knew that didn’t make any sense, but he couldn’t help it. He felt naïve and stupid for thinking they had a chance. And yet he knew they _had_ to have a chance, because they were his people’s best chance in so many years. They had to win.

So he worked. Tirelessly. He tried to convince Lexi to look for a cure until she begged him to stop. He and Liam had incredibly tough training sessions they both knew their bodies didn’t need. He wanted to focus his energy on something useful, or at least something that could get his head of all the angara that were being captured every minute the Archon wasn’t killed.

On one of those times, he let the door open. At such a late hour, it was unlikely anyone would need him for anything, so he was focused on dismantling his rifle yet another time – because he thought there was a useful mod it could be fit in there somehow, but also because he couldn’t sleep.

(He had been thinking about his father. He usually avoided those thoughts, as they only brought pointless pain, but after all he had learned, it was impossible to run from them. He used to comfort himself thinking the kett probably had no use for mineworkers in their home planet. His death would have been obvious, and most likely quick, painless.

That was what he told himself to calm down. Other times, when his mind wandered further, he couldn’t help but think maybe the kett didn’t kill him immediately. Maybe they needed mine workers. Maybe other kett in their home system needed a new slave, and that had been his father’s fate for the rest of his days. For Jaal, there was nothing more horrifying. As a child, thinking about that terrified him so much he would end up crying on his mother’s lap, unable to put all his fears into words. He was scared to share those nightmares with her, because, deep down, he knew there was nothing she could say to make it better. Hundreds of angaran were taken as slaves every day, so why not his father? Why not her, in the future, as well? Or even Jaal himself? None of them were safe. He knew that very early on, even if sometimes, for a young kid, it was tempting to forget.

Now, as an adult, he thought he knew better. He thought nothing could be worse than what he already knew. The thought of his father spending the rest of his life as a servant to those who made his people’s lives a living hell stopped haunting him, being replaced by something beyond anything he could have imagined before. His father’s trembling body in front of the Cardinal, his eyes welling up at the sight of her. Jaal could imagine his scream so clearly, it was like watching the soldier at the base all over again. His father’s blue, warm eyes replaced by that vacant blank stare. A mineworker going to battle for those who destroyed him. Jaal had prayed so much for his death to have been quick and painless, and now, maybe it had. Maybe it had been just a single shot fire onto his skull.

Maybe it had come from his rifle.)

Jaal sighed, trying to calm himself down. He wiped away a few tears in the back of his hand and heard the pyjak’s steps. He didn’t mind it.

“Hello”, Jaal said when it walked and jumped on the table in front of him. He didn’t talk much to the pyjak– it felt wrong to use the same childish tone the others adopted when talking to it, and it was strange to speak normally to something that wouldn’t answer.

He put his hand forward to let it sniff, but it didn’t move, choosing to examine his rifle instead. It was probably looking for the Paripo, Jaal thought. He stepped away from his table, reaching for it in the cabinet above his head. The fruit still wasn’t even close to half-eaten. It could still make for a delicious meal. In Aya, he could probably trade it for something nice, if he wanted to.

He would never trade it, of course. It was a precious thing for what it represented, not for what it was worth.

He cut a small piece and closed the cabinet, extending his hand to offer it to the pyjak. It sniffed it, like always, and Jaal waited for it to lick it off his hand and eat it.

Nothing happened, though. The pyjak finished smelling the fruit and sat on it’s back, staring at him.

It looked straight into his eyes. Jaal felt intimidated by it’s look – to him, it seemed almost indignant, as if it couldn’t believe he was doing that. He tried to insist, pushing his hand forward, closer to the pyjak’s face, but that just made it back away a bit.

“What is the matter?” Jaal asked, confused. The pyjak just kept staring at him, as if it knew something he didn’t. It’s huge, dark eyes seemed able to see through anything.

It knew he had been crying, Jaal realized. He smiled, touched by it’s concern. “Don’t worry, friend. I will be fine” He said. To his surprise, the pyjak gawked, almost as if replying to his word.

Jaal looked at it, puzzled. It moved forward, pushing his hand away with it’s head. He complied, closing his fist around the Paripo, and the pyjak nodded. Not only it didn’t want the piece, it seemed to want something else, too. Jaal stared at it confused. He moved to throw it away, but the pyjak gawked, motioning towards the fruit with it’s head and tail.

Jaal stood there for a moment. Then, not sure if he had gotten it correctly, he looked at the piece of Paripo and threw it his own mouth.

(When he was a child, his mother was often the one who put together those reunions. She’d get a big Paripo, her favorite, at the market for special occasions like a wedding or the birth of a child, but also just to get everyone together for one meal. Those were magical moments, not to be missed. He remembered the proud smile on her face when she put the place on the table, so grateful for all of them just for being there.

He knew Paripo tasted bitter for some people. To him, it tasted like family.)

He hadn’t eaten it in ages. He could feel his eyes welling up with tears again. He had forgotten how good raw fruit felt. He had been eating rations for so long now – almost as long as he was away from home.

The pyjak gawked approvingly.

“Liam is definitely wrong about you” Jaal said, smiling at his little friend. He thought he knew what it needed, but it ended up being the opposite. The pyjak waved it’s tail around and layed down in the counter next to him, getting ready to sleep. Jaal decided to go to bed as well.

(The next day, he called Drack in the intercom. He had a good idea for the next dinner of the crew.)

-

Peebee liked it.

She liked the way it moved, with quick, slight steps, it’s big dark eyes staring at everything around it. For such a small creature, the Tempest probably looked like an entire new interesting planet.

(Peebee envied it a little for that, sometimes – especially at night, when she couldn’t sleep in her pod, her hand looming over the ignition button, feeling as if the walls were coming together to crush her.)

It didn’t like eezo, of course, so it stayed away from her, but she didn’t care. She liked just watching it. She had never had a pet before, and it was fun to see how it behaved, how it fit into the ship’s environment. Pyjaks were kind of a strange mix between clever and silly, which she found amazing.

So it wouldn’t keep her company in her room – big deal. She had Poc for that, anyway.

(She still felt someone should have named it, though. She had to talk to Ryder about that.)

It was like a game, because she had to be sneaky about it, to follow it silently, because one abrupt movement would make it run away. They were easily scared, pyjaks, like most creatures of their size should be. In Peebee’s opinion, it was a positive trait: They were hyper aware of everything around them, making their survival easier. It explained how they were able to inhabit Tuchanka, of all places.

With time, she took up the habit of throwing little bits of food to it, from a safe distance. She wanted to see how it would react if it knew it was her or if it didn’t see her. Would it sniff it first? Would it run away scared, or try to see where the food came from?

Mostly, it just ate whatever she threw. Ok, so it wasn’t a genius. It was still fun.

It was a nice way to pass the time on the ship, between one mission and another, when she felt like looking another time at her remnant’s notes would make her head explode. It was a good way to avoid the others, too, without Lexi staring at her with that oh-so worrying expression of hers. It wasn’t personal –she liked Liam and Gil a lot, and to her surprise, she was starting to find Vetra pretty fun, too. Actually, she liked talking to pretty much all of them. But too much talking led to too much intimacy, which led to too much caring, and that was the kind of thing that made her want to run all the way to her scape pod, press the ignition button and never hear the word “pathfinder” ever again.

(“Calm the hell down and go back to bed” Kalinda would scoff when she caught her up in the middle of the night, way too many times, staring at the windows again, that desperate desire to run away from everything and everyone washing over her.

Kalinda was an asshole. She would just say that, turn around and go back to sleep. No hugs or comfort talk. That wasn’t how things worked between them.

And Peebee would take a moment, breathe a couple times, then look at her figure in the bed – her soft skin wrapped in her sheets, her smell all over her room, the sound of her voice still echoing in her ears. Kalinda was also the only one who made her want to stay.)

The pyjak, though, was safe. It didn’t care whether she was on board of the Tempest or not. Hell, it didn’t even care who she was, honestly, as long as she kept feeding it. For her, it was a perfect situation.

She took the time to observe it’s anatomy, too – she didn’t find alien biology one quarter as interesting as alien technology, but it was fun to notice sometimes, even if she would never admit it to Lexi. It had big ears and huge dark eyes. It walked in four legs, but it was able to jump and do graceful movements most quadrupeds didn’t. Peebee had listened to Ryder calling it a “space monkey”, and she knew monkeys were animals native to Earth, but she had no idea what they looked like.

(In Hyetiana, there weren’t many domestic animals. It was mainly focused on research, after all, and pets didn’t really fit in.

It was such a small planet, it probably turned to dust during the first hundreds of years of their travel. She grew up there surrounded by scientists, complex machines and mechanical fields. As a child, she thought it was the most incredible place ever, full of the most amazing things she could ever imagine.

As a teenager, she started to look up.

She didn’t visit Hyetiana before leaving with the Initiative. Kalinda told her to, but she ignored her. She said it was because there was nothing there to see, and it was true – but a tiny part of her that was terrified of ending up changing her mind.)

As far as alien fauna goes, though, the pyjak’s physique was pretty average, so she forgot that aspect very quickly. It didn’t matter, though. It wasn’t like she was going to write a thesis about it, after all (geez, she couldn’t imagine something more boring). It was just a fun pastime.

She needed one, to be honest. She had the time of her life studying the ancient technology, but on the past few missions, running into that damn krogan more than once was starting to make her feel nervous. Something was off there. It was like someone was chasing them without a clear agenda of their own, with little interest in the Remnant themselves, just to mess with her and her plans. She had never seen that krogan in her life before, but the whole thing seemed clearly personal.

Peebee was, in her own not-so-humble opinion, a genius, but it didn’t take one to connect it to the only person in the Nexus who had a seriously complicated history with her.

She didn’t want to, though. Kalinda was such an asshole, but for the longest time she had been _her_ asshole (and she loved that pun so much). In fact, they had a great time being assholes together. They never claimed to be exclusive, but they both knew there wasn’t anybody else – there is a certain degree of commitment in going to another galaxy with someone, after all. They didn’t need to talk about it, and that was one of Peebee’s favorite things about Kalinda: she knew her. People thought she was crazy or irresponsible, but Kalinda understood. She never asked for more than what Peebee was comfortable with. She didn’t want to.

Except when she did. And it all went to hell. And now she was alone in a new galaxy with an obsessive ex who made her life’s mission to piss her off.

She didn’t want to dwell on it. It was just an annoying fact. When she couldn’t avoid thinking about it, it was hurtful, like a wound she’d just scratched by accident. She wasn’t _used_ to hate Kalinda. She hated a fair amount of things, but never her. That was part of their deal. Especially in Andromeda, it was supposed to be them against everyone else, if necessary. Remembering that made her feel stupid, but thinking about her like an enemy felt weird and unnatural. Most of the time, Peebee avoided thinking about her at all.

And then Poc was gone. When she heard Sam’s announcement, she was so furious she wanted to scream, and then later, alone in her pod, so frustrated and upset she wanted to cry.

(She did neither of those things. She couldn’t risk anyone in the ship hearing her.)

Instead, she focused on tracking Kalinda down. She knew there had to be someone who would tell her where she was – Kalinda made many deals, but not a lot of friends. Peebee knew someone would snitch on her location, she just had to find that person. She had to find her, to save Poc and to end that damn quarrel.

So she worked non-stop. At night, her pod felt larger, emptier. It made her nervous. She’d grown so used to having Poc around, even if she wasn’t doing anything. Now she’d lay down and close her eyes but not manage to fall asleep. She could wait for hours, try every single damn meditation technique Lexi kept emailing her about, and she’d still remain wide awake.

Most of the time, she’d just give up and start looking for intel on Kalinda again. Then, after a while, her body would just do the hard work for her, finally falling into bed out of exhaustion, but never for more than a few hours. It felt like going back to her first couple of nights at the Tempest.

(Her hands sweat as she dug her fingernails into her palms. Her heart beat so fast in her chest it made her feel like she was going to faint, but she never did. It was more than fear – it felt like a constant almost panic, that anxious feeling looming over her. It always happened whenever she slept somewhere new, especially if there were other people around.

Nobody was in the room with her, she’d tell herself, with rushed breath, clinging to it like a blanket. She could always leave, run away without leaving anything important behind. Nobody could hold her down – nobody was in the room with her. The walls in that pod were so close, so suffocating, but she had a constant possibility of scape – _nobody was in the room with her_.

She needed that, that chance. She needed it to go back to sleep.)

Now, it felt her pod was big. Way bigger than it needed to be. Like it was floating in space by itself, disconnected of anything. Like it could just disappear, eaten away by the Scourge, and she’d just go with it.

She tried to calm herself down, to grab onto her safe mantra – nobody was there, nobody was in the room her. But that solitude was suddenly scary, too – suddenly her pod’s walls seemed to be vanished, gone, and she was just going to stay there forever, her body paralyzed by that horrible feeling, unable to move a muscle or make a sound.

(It frustrated her to no end that, sometimes, in the middle of that anxiety, the idea of leaving the Tempest seemed just as terrifying as the idea of staying.)

Then she’d hear the pyjak’s steps. Always incredibly light, slight steps that could never wake anybody else up. It was walking in the hallways, or among the ventilation vents, or wherever such a small animal could fit inside that ship.

She closed her eyes and couldn’t sleep, but she focused on that rhythm, one step after the other. Not a crewmate, not a person, but a living thing, walking, existing right next to her. One step after the other – and, little by little, she was again aware of her pod’s walls, of the fact that she wasn’t floating in dark space. She wasn’t lost.

Someone else wasn’t sleeping, she thought.

Nobody was in the room with her – but she wasn’t alone, either.

To her own surprise, that didn’t feel so bad anymore.

-

Liam thought it was a great idea.

Not like Ryder asked him before, of course, because Ryder never asked anyone before doing anything. In Liam’s opinion, that was one of the best things about her. In Andromeda, asking questions was the first thing they were advised to do, in any situation, ever. It got kind of frustrating. So to just go to the Nexus, grab a cage with a pyjak inside, and tell the crew they had a new mate to travel with? Awesome. He could get used to that.

He had some experience with pets, but not much. His family had two cats back home, Ginger and Gideon – two little assholes who loved sleeping, scratching his feet and hiding inside his closet.

He missed them. He just didn’t think much about it, because he couldn’t – in Andromeda, asking questions was the first thing they were advised to do, and thinking about the Milky Way was the last. It should be avoided as much as possible, for their own sanity.

(Asking questions _about_ the Milky Way was for specialists only. The Initiative didn’t say, but Liam knew why – it was just a touchy subject, the whole “everyone you ever knew is dead” thing. However, in his opinion, it was useless advice. Everyone he saw getting out of cryo had the same look on their faces when the realization of what they had done downed in them, even if just for a moment. It was stupid to not get the questions out of the way immediately.

Personally, Liam didn’t _want_ to forget the Milky Way –he remembered his father’s soft voice, his mother’s bright smile, Ginger and Gideon’s little paws crawling on top of him when he was resting in the couch after a long day of work. It hurt, but it also lighted up a fire on his chest, a clear will to get work done.

Thinking about what he left behind made him see what was in front of him a little bit better.

Thinking about the home he left behind made he want to work harder to find a new one.)

So as far as he was concerned, yeah, a pet was a cool idea. Plus, it would be good for morale. Having animals around was always good for soldiers, and, in the Tempest, Liam hoped their new mate would help everyone else in the team to bond among themselves. Friendships couldn’t be forced, obviously, but it would be better if everyone in the crew learned to care for each other. It helped to keep everyone in their best mood, which, in Liam’s opinion, always led to better work being done.

Plus, friendship was useful in the battlefield. Painful, too, sometimes, but that was part of the job.

(He could never get the image of Kirkland’s body out of his mind, as much as he tried to. Sometimes, when things got too rough – when Tann had already hanged up on him, Jaal was busy, Verand wasn’t answering and he needed to do something, anything – he took his shirt off, laid down at the floor and did two hundred push-ups he didn’t need to. Even then, there was a tiny voice in his mind who kept going _this is not a home_ against his constant mantra of _it has to be,_ and Kirkland’s bloody, lifeless body always came up as he tried his best to avoid seeing it as a sign.)

He didn’t know any of specifics on how to take care of a pyjak, but honestly, it didn’t seem necessary. It was a pet, after all. It wanted food, attention and a place to sleep, and everything else was just details.

The peeing surprised him, though. He had never seen an animal pee that much. For the first days after Ryder got it, Liam kept stumbling onto random pools of pee around the Tempest. At first, it was funny; then it became an annoyance; and, finally, when he almost slip and fell over a particularly large one in the middle of the hallway, he decided somebody had to train the little thing to find a toilet and stick to it.

The ideal place would be the cage, of course. He could cover it in some absorbent material - Vetra would have no trouble finding it. He and Jaal could take turns changing it. That was easy.

The not-so-easy part was training the pyjak. He had no idea of what were the proper procedures to follow. He remembered a little from Gideon and Ginger’s toilet training, but mostly he just went by what seemed to make sense. Not like anyone else in Tempest would know how to correct him, either.

The main thing you had to do, from what he remembered when his father was trying to train the cats, was catching it in the act and carrying it to the right place. That way, it started to associate the act of peeing with that specific place, and later, when it wanted to, it would go there by itself.

It didn’t work with the pyjak, though. The asshole somehow got shy about his toilet habits when there was someone watching. Liam tried following it around as much as he could in his free time, but it was pointless – it was like it waited for him to go away to just pee everywhere.

He asked Jaal to keep an eye on it, too, but he had his own weird relationship with the little thing. He asked Liam if it was sacred, and it took him almost a full minute to stop laughing before answering. That was the thing of having friends from other galaxies, you just never knew what to expect – one day they were asking you how your language was created, and on the other they were looking at a half-monkey-half-dog type of animal like it was a respectful entity. It was as strange as it was awesome.

(He wouldn’t talk to him about it, because that wasn’t how he worked, but when he was feeling too frustrated with that new galaxy, the new enemies and all the new rules he hadn’t thought would be there, he always came up on the tech lab to talk to Jaal, to ask him something he didn’t even want to know that much. He didn’t have all the answers to the endless questions Liam could have about the angara, just like he didn’t know everything there was to know about humans. Sometimes they just speculated on their own, made up silly stuff, tried out new slangs or jokes that could fit both cultures. It didn’t matter. Talking to Jaal was always fun, interesting, exciting – how that entire journey was supposed to be and then wasn’t. It was something positive to focus on, and sometimes he needed that. The Archon was after their heads, they didn’t have enough outposts, and the angara were still not sure if they could trust them or not.

So it felt good to sit beside a friend, to laugh about something they couldn’t understand or something the both got it way too well. Sometimes, it was the only thing that made him feel like it was all worth it.)

So physically stopping the pyjak from peeing was a no. Fine. His next idea was finding something that could attract it – an essence or treat that could bring to his mind the idea of peeing in the right spot. He had no idea of how these worked, but he knew they were a thing for dogs and cats. A pyjak couldn’t be that different.

Apparently, though, it was. He asked Lexi about it first, and she said she had never heard of such a thing. Vetra didn’t know anything about it, either, and that was when he gave up – if Vetra had never heard of it, even it existed, the chances they had of coming across it in a market somewhere were remote.

He returned to the original plan, then: Catching it on the act and carrying it to the cage in time, so it would get that that was the place for peeing.

He didn’t always have the time to follow it around, though. Obviously, teaching a pet where to pee was low on his list of priorities. That list had to be constantly scrapped, though: There were so many things he wanted to get done that he just couldn’t, because there weren’t enough resources, there weren’t enough people, there wasn’t enough time, etc. It seemed like there was always an excuse to not do something right then, to help people immediately, and it drove him crazy. The few times when he was able to get actual, concrete work to do, it felt like a breath of fresh air, but those were just way too rare.

He didn’t blame Ryder, of course – he found it hard to blame anything on Ryder, really, even when she did fuck up. There was just so much riding on what she had to get right, there was no time to dwell on her wrongs. And he knew very well she was just as lost he was, just as lost as anyone else could be in that situation, with the additional condition of just having watched her father die.

So as far as Liam was concerned, his job in the Tempest wasn’t to give Ryder more work to do, but to help her. He wanted to get those outposts they needed, to help the angara, to make Ryder the hero everyone in the Nexus desperately needed her to be.

A lot of people become paralyzed in an unfolding crisis – he wasn’t one of those people. He had trained hard not to be. He had trained to get stuff done when everyone else was too shocked or too confused for that.

He didn’t train to sit around and watch people around him feeling miserable without helping in any way. There wasn’t enough training in the world for him to get used to that.

So he tried. And tried harder. And tried again. And when it didn’t work, he threw himself at the floor and did two hundred push-ups. Then three hundred. Then five hundred. Then he tried some more. He thought about Kirkland. He remembered his parents and how he was never going to see them again. And when it felt like everything was just crumbling around him as he just fucking stood there and watched, he sent Verand an email with the subject “this might convince you”.

(It did not go unnoticed by him that even after all that, he ended up needing Ryder, too.)

When they got back from that mission, the last thing on his mind was whatever the pyjak did with it’s time. He was thinking about Bradley’s voice in the com, about Verand’s shocked face when she saw him. He was thinking about all of those who came in to help, and how they all made it out. How they would all remember this, and tell the story to everyone around them.

He and Ryder watched Calot’s ship explode and, when they were leaving, he was feeling so relieved and peaceful not even the huge pool of pee outside of the meeting room was enough to bring him down.

It was enough to make Ryder slip, though.

 “You know what?” Liam said, trying to help her up. “Maybe we could get more pets around here. You know, to keep it some company.”

Ryder rolled her eyes, smiling.

For the first time in weeks, it felt easy to smile back.

-

It liked to hang out by the bridge.

Gil was the one who noticed it, in one of his many meetings with Kallo, interrupting one of their many fights.

“Look at this little asshole”, he scoffed, smiling as the pyjak jumped up in the counter next to Kallo’s chair. Gil snapped his fingers at it, letting it lick his hand. “You like it here, don’t you, buddy?”

“Indeed.” Kallo spoke, looking at the creature next to him. “It’s always around.”

“It seems to have adapted to the ship perfectly.” Suvi commented, raising her head from her panel.

“Professor Harik will be glad.” Kallo said, while the pyjak looked away from Gil’s hand and sat in front of the window. “He wasn’t sure it would be able to.”

“It’s astonishing how well life can adapt to get used to different environments.” Suvi continued, her voice filled with honest wonder.

The three of them then went back to their respective chores – Kallo and Gil were arguing about a new modification in the drive core, and Suvi was looking at soil samples from Voeld, trying to get some new data for their newest outpost. Back in the med bay, Lexi was running through Drack’s exams. The old krogan was busy talking to Vetra about their most recent deal in Kadara. Peebee was right next to them, fixing a few engines in Poc. In the back row, Core was in the middle of an intense training session, while Jaal and Liam sat next to her, comparing different exercises they had learned in the Alliance and the Resistance.

Sara Ryder was in her cabin, sleeping.

The Tempest’s engine hummed softly, like always.

In the bridge, the pyjak sat in front of the windows and watched the stars.


End file.
